Disclaimer: This post has been incomplete and on the back-burner for quite a long time, as such, I apologise if it doesn't flow as well as it otherwise could, or if any observations are outdated, I will guard against this as best I can.
Hi all, harkening back to the first post I made on this blog, wherein I pointed out the arbitrary nature of the "nerd" identity, my stance on such things has not changed much, but I do find myself wondering if the world (or at least, the internet) might be an altogether more pleasant place to exist if we all stopped referring to ourselves by our hobbies.
Let me make my stance very clear, I am not saying people can't be fans of things, that would be ridiculous, but I don't understand why the thing you like has to be a part of your identity. For example. A while ago, one of my Facebook friends posted a particularly frustrated status on the subject of Doctor Who, or, more accurately, a facet of the Doctor Who fandom. In a nutshell, this person was annoyed at the newer members of the fandom for referring to themselves as "Dweeks" as opposed to "Whovians."
Essentially this equated to taking issue with a group of people for affixing a name to a fandom, (which they were as much a part of as the person in question) that wasn't the one they were used to. I'm not judging, people can be passionate about whatever they like, with that said I do have to say one thing.
As grievances go, "your arbitrary designation is not as good as mine" seems a little on the petty side, but that's not the entirety of what I'm taking issue with here. The real problem here is that people have an unfortunate tendency to affix self-worth to their status as a member of their chosen fandom. Whether you think identifying by a fandom label is a big deal or not, I would say that this attitude above all else needs to go.
Gatekeepers, that's what these aspects of fandom are called, not by themselves, of course, they prefer to refer to themselves as "hardcore" or perhaps more arrogantly, "real" fans "oh you like Batman? Who was the first person to play him on-screen? Adam West? LOL WRONG!! NOT A REAL FAN!" (it was Lewis Wilson in the 40s by the way, and yes, I did have to look that one up.)
More than anything else, this attitude that one has to commit a large enough portion of their time to amass an arbitrary amount of trivia in order to somehow earn the right to call themselves a fan, is what needs to go in my opinion. Despite what some will say, you are allowed to declare yourself a fan of something without dedicating large portions of your time to it.
If you choose to dedicate that time to it, that's fine too. A problem arises, however when you take the fact that you have invested that time, attach a sense of status to it, and wield your imagined seniority like a club, enacting a smug sense of superiority. In the worst cases, this can not only make a fandom seem hostile and unwelcoming to newcomers, (which directly harms the subject of the fandom by intimidating away new audiences.) But it can also give the entire fandom identity a bad name to outside observers.
It is here I come back to my original point, I, of course, take no issue whatsoever with people enjoying things or the level of time sunk into it, whatever it is, you do you. I do, however, think affixing an identity to the practice of being a fan of something has a less than positive knock-on effect. See, once you assign a name to a group, be it Whovian, Trekkie, or especially the most general ones like Gamer or Otaku, that creates a subcultural label, which in turn, intentionally or not, creates an image, and eventually a stereotype.
This is a problem that makes the aforementioned Gatekeepers exacerbating agents for another problem entirely. That problem is one of cultural perception. I've long disapproved of sorting people into collectives. just for one of my most personal pet-peeves, there is no such thing as "the disabled community" and the fact that people seem to think that I should automatically be inspired by anything noteworthy another disabled person does, is indicative of a larger problem. But anyway, that's a rant for another time.
Going back to fandoms I understand that "Gamer" "Trekkie" "Otaku" and words like that, when they first came into being, were words that helped people find like-minded individuals to discuss their interests with. Even now at the height of the internet age, when everything is more-or-less equally accessible, (provided you know where to look) at the best of times are just harmless shorthand to use in conversation, to give (hopefully) reasonable people a vague idea of your interests without having to talk their ears off, unfortunately it's not always seen that way.
First let's look at it from the point of view of an outside observer, what do you think the uninitiated average Joe thinks of when the word "Gamer" is uttered? I highly doubt it's just an average person who happens to like playing games a lot.
South Park may be able to provide a possible answer to that, with one of my personal favourite episodes, Make Love, Not Warcraft. which features a broad parody of a gamer in the form of a character known as "Jenkins The Griefer" here's a picture of him.
(for those unfamiliar, a "griefer" is a player of online multiplayer games who derives enjoyment from deliberately hampering, harassing or simply annoying other players.)
Within the episode, the Griefer has played World of Warcraft "almost every hour of every day for the past year and a half"
South Park as a show deals in broad parody and satire, so I am of course, well aware that this is not a reflection of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's opinion of people who play games, However, the caricature exists, and resonates comedically precisely because a distressing amount of people do have that opinion. To many people outside the game-playing community, this is what a "Gamer" is, well, either that or a child/teenager with a headset screaming racism-laden obscenities to an unseen person as if they were just behind his TV set.
Is that fair? No, of course not, but fair or not, there are many who would take this caricature at face value. Granted, these are not people that the more reasonable of us should concern ourselves with, but they do exist.
This is barely a relevant problem though, in fact, I find myself wondering, even as I type this why I devoted so much time to explain the fact that a fandom identity may lead to a stereotype that people who have nothing to do with it might judge harshly. It's bullshit, and it's frustrating but I think it's definitely a more of a symptom than a cause.
A possible cause of this symptom is, in my opinion, a much more serious problem. I'm talking of course about fandom toxicity.
I've touched on this earlier to inform the previous point, but, allow me to be blunt, generally speaking, fandoms are fucking shit, the gatekeepers, the "real" fans, and those that attach a sense of ownership to the thing they claim to love, serve only to hurt the thing they profess to support by making any community of fans it might have inhospitable to newcomers. That's if they don't outright harass new people (and sometimes long-established contributors to the product) away from it because it was taken in a direction they didn't agree with. A lot has happened to showcase this breed of "fan" since I started writing this post all that time ago, among the most notable, the Rick & Morty Schezuan sauce fiasco, proof if further proof be needed that Rick & Morty fans do not understand Rick & Morty. (a fact which has caused me to go from an enthusiastic blabbermouth about the show to the point of being almost embarrassed to be known to like it for fear of association.) and the less said about Star Wars fans lately, the better. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that Star Wars fans don't actually like Star Wars, but for some reason, like to pretend they do or once did. An even more casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that anything that could be so loved by a certain type of Star Wars fan couldn't possibly be worth bothering with.
The inevitable cause of this problem is, to a degree, popularity, and I'm not talking about things being better before they went "all mainstream" but in the words of Terry Pratchett "the intelligence of the creature known as the crowd is the square root of the number of people in it."
The point here is, anything with sufficient exposure and popularity will have a toxic element to the fandom, just by law of percentages, unfortunately, there's not much we can do about that. It also means that as long as fandom identities exist, there will always be toxic shitweasels to taint the image.
Even in spite of that though, since starting to write this all that time ago, I've come across groups of really nice people that were brought together by the very thing I've spent this post decrying, and who, there's a good chance would share my opinion on this stuff on the whole. The difference is these people never took their status as fans as an indicator of...well, status. so who am I to tell them they can't casually refer to each other by a collective name?
So it appears, I've travelled a very long road to explain why fandoms can often be a bit shit, as well as just some of the negative impact being a "bad fan", can have. So don't be that, being a fan of something is supposed to be a good thing, let's not ruin it.
I don't know whether I pity or envy the people I've decried in this post, on the one hand, I despair at their conduct and think whatever they're a fan of deserves better fans. On the other, I wish I had so few problems that I could get that worked up over some of the things that they do.
TL:DR obsessive, or I suppose "competitive" fans can be the absolute worst, that thing you like is cool, stop being a dick to people who agree with you and maybe people outside will stop seeing you as Jenkins the Greifer.
Essentially this equated to taking issue with a group of people for affixing a name to a fandom, (which they were as much a part of as the person in question) that wasn't the one they were used to. I'm not judging, people can be passionate about whatever they like, with that said I do have to say one thing.
As grievances go, "your arbitrary designation is not as good as mine" seems a little on the petty side, but that's not the entirety of what I'm taking issue with here. The real problem here is that people have an unfortunate tendency to affix self-worth to their status as a member of their chosen fandom. Whether you think identifying by a fandom label is a big deal or not, I would say that this attitude above all else needs to go.
Gatekeepers, that's what these aspects of fandom are called, not by themselves, of course, they prefer to refer to themselves as "hardcore" or perhaps more arrogantly, "real" fans "oh you like Batman? Who was the first person to play him on-screen? Adam West? LOL WRONG!! NOT A REAL FAN!" (it was Lewis Wilson in the 40s by the way, and yes, I did have to look that one up.)
More than anything else, this attitude that one has to commit a large enough portion of their time to amass an arbitrary amount of trivia in order to somehow earn the right to call themselves a fan, is what needs to go in my opinion. Despite what some will say, you are allowed to declare yourself a fan of something without dedicating large portions of your time to it.
If you choose to dedicate that time to it, that's fine too. A problem arises, however when you take the fact that you have invested that time, attach a sense of status to it, and wield your imagined seniority like a club, enacting a smug sense of superiority. In the worst cases, this can not only make a fandom seem hostile and unwelcoming to newcomers, (which directly harms the subject of the fandom by intimidating away new audiences.) But it can also give the entire fandom identity a bad name to outside observers.
It is here I come back to my original point, I, of course, take no issue whatsoever with people enjoying things or the level of time sunk into it, whatever it is, you do you. I do, however, think affixing an identity to the practice of being a fan of something has a less than positive knock-on effect. See, once you assign a name to a group, be it Whovian, Trekkie, or especially the most general ones like Gamer or Otaku, that creates a subcultural label, which in turn, intentionally or not, creates an image, and eventually a stereotype.
This is a problem that makes the aforementioned Gatekeepers exacerbating agents for another problem entirely. That problem is one of cultural perception. I've long disapproved of sorting people into collectives. just for one of my most personal pet-peeves, there is no such thing as "the disabled community" and the fact that people seem to think that I should automatically be inspired by anything noteworthy another disabled person does, is indicative of a larger problem. But anyway, that's a rant for another time.
Going back to fandoms I understand that "Gamer" "Trekkie" "Otaku" and words like that, when they first came into being, were words that helped people find like-minded individuals to discuss their interests with. Even now at the height of the internet age, when everything is more-or-less equally accessible, (provided you know where to look) at the best of times are just harmless shorthand to use in conversation, to give (hopefully) reasonable people a vague idea of your interests without having to talk their ears off, unfortunately it's not always seen that way.
First let's look at it from the point of view of an outside observer, what do you think the uninitiated average Joe thinks of when the word "Gamer" is uttered? I highly doubt it's just an average person who happens to like playing games a lot.
South Park may be able to provide a possible answer to that, with one of my personal favourite episodes, Make Love, Not Warcraft. which features a broad parody of a gamer in the form of a character known as "Jenkins The Griefer" here's a picture of him.
Within the episode, the Griefer has played World of Warcraft "almost every hour of every day for the past year and a half"
South Park as a show deals in broad parody and satire, so I am of course, well aware that this is not a reflection of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's opinion of people who play games, However, the caricature exists, and resonates comedically precisely because a distressing amount of people do have that opinion. To many people outside the game-playing community, this is what a "Gamer" is, well, either that or a child/teenager with a headset screaming racism-laden obscenities to an unseen person as if they were just behind his TV set.
Is that fair? No, of course not, but fair or not, there are many who would take this caricature at face value. Granted, these are not people that the more reasonable of us should concern ourselves with, but they do exist.
This is barely a relevant problem though, in fact, I find myself wondering, even as I type this why I devoted so much time to explain the fact that a fandom identity may lead to a stereotype that people who have nothing to do with it might judge harshly. It's bullshit, and it's frustrating but I think it's definitely a more of a symptom than a cause.
A possible cause of this symptom is, in my opinion, a much more serious problem. I'm talking of course about fandom toxicity.
I've touched on this earlier to inform the previous point, but, allow me to be blunt, generally speaking, fandoms are fucking shit, the gatekeepers, the "real" fans, and those that attach a sense of ownership to the thing they claim to love, serve only to hurt the thing they profess to support by making any community of fans it might have inhospitable to newcomers. That's if they don't outright harass new people (and sometimes long-established contributors to the product) away from it because it was taken in a direction they didn't agree with. A lot has happened to showcase this breed of "fan" since I started writing this post all that time ago, among the most notable, the Rick & Morty Schezuan sauce fiasco, proof if further proof be needed that Rick & Morty fans do not understand Rick & Morty. (a fact which has caused me to go from an enthusiastic blabbermouth about the show to the point of being almost embarrassed to be known to like it for fear of association.) and the less said about Star Wars fans lately, the better. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that Star Wars fans don't actually like Star Wars, but for some reason, like to pretend they do or once did. An even more casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that anything that could be so loved by a certain type of Star Wars fan couldn't possibly be worth bothering with.
The inevitable cause of this problem is, to a degree, popularity, and I'm not talking about things being better before they went "all mainstream" but in the words of Terry Pratchett "the intelligence of the creature known as the crowd is the square root of the number of people in it."
The point here is, anything with sufficient exposure and popularity will have a toxic element to the fandom, just by law of percentages, unfortunately, there's not much we can do about that. It also means that as long as fandom identities exist, there will always be toxic shitweasels to taint the image.
Even in spite of that though, since starting to write this all that time ago, I've come across groups of really nice people that were brought together by the very thing I've spent this post decrying, and who, there's a good chance would share my opinion on this stuff on the whole. The difference is these people never took their status as fans as an indicator of...well, status. so who am I to tell them they can't casually refer to each other by a collective name?
So it appears, I've travelled a very long road to explain why fandoms can often be a bit shit, as well as just some of the negative impact being a "bad fan", can have. So don't be that, being a fan of something is supposed to be a good thing, let's not ruin it.
I don't know whether I pity or envy the people I've decried in this post, on the one hand, I despair at their conduct and think whatever they're a fan of deserves better fans. On the other, I wish I had so few problems that I could get that worked up over some of the things that they do.
TL:DR obsessive, or I suppose "competitive" fans can be the absolute worst, that thing you like is cool, stop being a dick to people who agree with you and maybe people outside will stop seeing you as Jenkins the Greifer.
